BookWorm: Zero To One

Peter Thiel is the guy who identified the multi-billion dollar businesses like Paypal, Facebook, LinkedIn and Palantir very early and invested in them. The best way to predict the future is to create it. Peter knows that for sure and in his book he reveals the secrets.

The most interesting thing about future is that it’s unpredictable. Anybody who claims that he or she can predict the future is either lying or crazy, possibly both.

However, there’s still a way in which a handful of people have ended up not only predicting the future but benefitting from it enormously and creating disproportionate amount of wealth in the process. These are the people who believe – “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

The problem is that these people work secretly and rarely come out in public to claim their share of fame. But once in a while, you see a dark horse coming out and willing to share his or her thought process.

Peter Thiel is one such dark horse who was relatively unknown outside the group of selective people in Silicon Valley. In case you don’t know about Peter Thiel, he was the founder of PayPal (with Elon Musk) and an early stage investor in Facebook, LinkedIn and SpaceX. He is one guy who has been there, done that. Thiel’s ideas are must read for every entrepreneur.

In this post, I’ll share some big ideas I learned from Thiel’s book Zero to One. The book is based on his lectures at Stanford University. One of his students, Blake Masters, made lecture notes and published it. The notes became instant hit on the internet and soon Masters got an opportunity to co-author ‘Zero to One’ with Peter Thiel.

In just few years, Blake Masters went from being Peter Thiel’s student to co-author. I call this strategy, exposing yourself to positive black swan or in simple words, giving luck a chance to find you. But I’ll save that discussion for some other day.

Let’s talk about the book.

Nassim Taleb says in his endorsement of this book – “If a risk taker writes a book, read it. If it is Peter Thiel, read it twice. In fact, read it thrice to be safe.”

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